The glowing red letters on the clock tell me it’s 3:17 a.m.. I should be asleep, but for the past five hours, someone has been talking to me nonstop, refusing to let me pass through the gate into blessed slumber.

That someone is me.

I’ve never been what you might call a good sleeper. As a child, I needed a room that was absolutely dark and starkly quiet, before I could fall asleep. Even then, I had trouble shutting down my thoughts so I put them to better use, inventing stories, of which I was the star, to usher me into the Land of Nod.

I only broke my stubborn determination to control my sleep environment twice a year, and that’s when my family would travel from Albuquerque, N.M., to Ardmore, Okla., to visit my grandparents.

While my siblings in the back seat slept away the miles, I sat upright and wide awake in the front seat, my father on my left, chain smoking as he drove, and his copilot, my mother, on my right.

We’d get to my grandparents’ house late at night and after a tired round of hugs and groggy conversations, most everyone would head to bed. If I was lucky, I would be assigned to the feather bed that had been set up in the living room to help accommodate our large family.

I’d lie there in its softness, eyes shut, pretending to be in dreamland, while my mother and grandmother talked through the night. It didn’t matter what they were talking about; it was the sound of their voices, so comfortable with one another and so loving that soothed me, the stories and gossip gently lulling me to sleep.

It wasn’t until I graduated from college and got my first job on a newspaper that I finally learned to curtail the fussiness of my sleeping habits. My job required me to sleep with a police scanner on. When, I don’t know how, I’d hear a call about a serious car accident or a house on fire, I’d roll out of bed and into my car in pursuit of news.

Working erratic hours and long days, I quickly learned that sleep was not something to be lured and coaxed, but something that needed to be grabbed when you could and held onto for as long as possible.

After a few years of that, I was no longer a sleep prima donna. So it comes somewhat as a surprise and disappointment that I seem to be reverting to my old habits, although this time it is not light pouring in from beneath a door or a loudly ticking clock that keeps me awake. It’s my own thoughts: I can’t seem to get my brain to shut up.

I wouldn’t mind so much if those thoughts were revealing answers to mysteries or solutions to world problems, but no, most of the time I obsess over the smallest of things, turning little pebbles of thought over and over in my mind until they become smooth and polished.

I try to distract myself. I focus on happy, non-worrying things. I try to slip into fantasy scenarios, but still, my brain continues to return to the troubling, the banal and the plain silly.

Every hour or so, I look at the clock and calculate my fate. If I can fall asleep in the next 10 minutes, I tell myself, I can still get a good six hours of sleep. A respectable five hours. A paltry four. A miserable three.

Fortunately, these sleep battles are not a nightly thing, but when they come, I often take the coward’s way out, surrendering to my wakefulness by picking up my phone to search Wikipedia for some random bit of history I’ve always been curious about, or clicking on the television to watch movies I wouldn’t bother with in the daytime.

This is the wrong course, I know, so now I’m trying time reversal. I imagine myself back in my grandmother’s feather bed, listening to her and my mother talk on and on. And before I know it, I’m asleep.

Joan Morris is the pets & wildlife columnist for the Bay Area News Group. She also writes about gardening and is the founder of Our Garden, a demonstration garden in Walnut Creek. Morris started her career in 1978 as a reporter for a small New Mexico newspaper. She has lived in the Bay Area since 1988.

A group of deputies put the “Santa” in Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday when they visited the pediatrics wing at Valley Medical Center to hand out gifts to patients, funded by the proceeds of the Heroes Run charity.